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Romancing the Vine in Virginia

No Wine before It’s Time

by Charles M. Holloway

Jamestown Settlement interpreters Michael Lund, Homer Lanier, Steve
Martin, and Joseph Freitus, costumed as seventeenth-century
sailors, lower a cask of Virginia wine in the hold of the
replica Susan Constant as if for shipment to England.

- Dave Doody

The Virginia Company colonists who sailed down the
Thames for the Chesapeake in 1606 took along a taste for the grape . .
. and for beer, and for aqua vitae, and for Madeira, and for porter, and
for Canary, and for sack, and for ale and for drink in most of its forms
and flavors, fermented or distilled, in general and in particular. In
their time, a time when water was not to be trusted, Englishmen drank
per capita forty gallons of alcohol a year. The libation business was
in those days lucrative, and no small part of the trade was the wine crossing
the Channel from the Continent bound for England’s tables and taverns.
It was part of the reason the Virginia Company’s three-ship fleet
was making its way to sea.

The merchants and gentlemen of the company who invested in the voyage
intended from it to profit. Such things as gold mines and the Northwest
Passage were uppermost in the company’s calculations. But commodities
figured in its schemes as well. Virginia was set up for a trading colony,
and its managers expected from its servants such manufactures as glass,
iron, naval stores, silk, and wine. Such New World imports looked to fetch
tidy sums.

In the end, it was tobacco that made a market, but in the beginning
wine looked more likely. The chronicle of Virginia viticulture thus begins
at Jamestown, the scene of many failures and blasted hopes. Its history
is sometimes desultory, and it is often discouraging, but 396 years later,
the enterprise is at last paying off.

Captain John Smith, who made the four-month trip to the colony
with the original 105 settlers, later wrote that at Jamestown there
were vines “in great abundance in many parts that climbe the
toppes of the highest trees.” The company’s records
say Virginia “yeeldeth naturally great store” of grapevines
“and of sundry sorts, which by culture will be brought to
excellent perfection.” Smith said that “of hedge grapes,
we made neere 20 gallons of wine, which was neare as good as your
French Brittish,” and that if they were “properly planted,
dressed and ordered by skillful ‘vinearoones’ we might
make a perfect grape and fruitfull Vintage in short time.”
By “vinearoones” he meant vignerons, people who cultivate
grapevines.

For decades, however, thirsty Virginians would make do with the
much distrusted water, try their hands at home brew and cider, and
look for ships from home, like the Mary and John, captained
by Samuel Argall. In 1609, Argall “came to truck with the
Colony, and to fish for Sturgeon, on a ship well-furnished with
wine and other good Provision.” Along the James River shores
he found ready customers, settlers often reduced to drinking from
the wide muddy tidal stream, and who sometimes paid for the gamble
with their lives. In the first year, colonist George Percy wrote,
“Our drinke [was] Cold water taken out of the River, which
was at a floud verie salt, at low tide full of slime and filth,
which was the destruction of many of our men.”

The London Company of Virginia hoped squadrons of Jamestown ships would be freighted with wine and profits. The plans did not
bear fruit.

- Dave Doody

After the Mary and John’s departure, the company ordered
Sir Thomas Gates, Virginia’s new governor, to “use the labour
of your owne men in makinge wines. ” In 1611, Gates’s successor,
Thomas Dale, established a three-acre vineyard of such native grapes as
scuppernong, or muscadine, and Catawba to test their adaptability for
the production of salable wine. The next chief executive, Lord De La Warr,
brought Smith’s vignerons. Frenchmen, some of them said the English
treated them more like slaves than employees, and none got a wine business
going. Their failure was blamed on climate, soil, lack of equipment, and
browsing deer.

In 1619, at the meeting of the first representative assembly in English
America, Speaker John Pory said, “Three things there bee which in
a few yeares may bring this Colony to perfection: the English plough,
vineyards and cattle.” The burgesses, sitting in the Jamestown church,
passed “Acte 12,” which required colonists to plant vineyards
and, to feed silkworms, set out six mulberry trees a year.

Interpreter Dan Hard, delivering goods to Williamsburg’s Raleigh Tavern, draws a mug of wine without falling off the wagon.

Dave Doody

Among the first to comply was yeoman John Johnson, who patented eighty-
five acres known as Jockey’s Neck on a plateau four miles east of
town. Much of it is now the heart of the Williamsburg Winery, established
in 1985, where more than fifty acres are under cultivation. One of its
popular vintages is Acte 12 Chardonnay.

But that’s getting ahead of the story. What little wine came of
early Virginia efforts was bitter and traveled badly, and to the lack
of proper drink was attributed some of the cause of the colony’s
failure to approach anything resembling perfection.

In 1622, Governor Francis Wyatt wrote to London:

When we dated our letters in June last, the Colony stood admirably
to health, within ten days succeeded great sickness and mortality:
This was scarcity and want of meanes: Understand it rightly, want
of beere, poultry, mutton &c . . . To plant a Colony by water
drinkers was an inexcusable errour in those, who layd the first foundacion,
and have made it a received custome, which until it be laide downe
againe, there is small hope of health.

Virginians found indeed other beverages to drink their health. As their
colony expanded, a modest form of prosperity developed, accompanied by
the encouragement of ordinaries, as taverns were sometimes called. In
1649, a writer reported that “six publike Brewhouses” served
Virginia and that its 5,000 settlers had plenty of barley and excellent
malt and brewed “their owne Beere, strong and good.”

Interpreters Clayton Williams, William Webb, and Bob Brown, left to right, lift
a glass in a Raleigh Tavern toast.

- Tom Green

William Byrd of Westover plantation wrote that at Caroline Courthouse,
“Colonel Armistead and Colonel Will Beverly have each of ’em
erected an ordinary well supplied with wine and other polite liquors,”
and “besides these, there is a rum ordinary for persons of more
vulgar taste.” Not much later, planter Robert Beverly said, “Their
richer sort generally brew their small beer with Malt, which they have
from England. . . . the poorer sort brew their Beer with Molasses and
Bran. Their strong drink is Madeira Wine.”

Governor William Berkeley, for one, would not give up on the native
grape. He experimented with wine growing and bottle making at his Green
Springs estate just west of Jamestown. During a visit in 1663, Beverly’s
father saw tree plantings that formed a trellis to support extensive grapevines.
Berkeley said his wine was “as good as any that came out of Italy.”

Berkeley dispatched Captain Henry Batt to explore western Virginia,
and Batt reported that he found “grapes of an incredible Plenty,
and Variety, some of which are very sweet” and “grapes so
prodigiously large they seem’d more like Bullace than Grapes.”
A bullace is a plum.

Thomas Jefferson, a wine connoisseur, tried winemaking at Monticello. The picture above shows a modern vineyard adjacent to the house

- .Dave Doody

By the late seventeenth century, most Virginia homes stocked
wine and spirits in variety and in quantities exceeded only by such
self-produced potations as pear wine and hard apple cider. A 1686
inventory of William Fauntleroy’s cellar in up-country Rappahannock
County listed ninety gallons of rum, twenty-five gallons of lime
juice, and twenty dozen bottles of wine.

Visitor Durand de Dauphine found that “merrymaking,”
including the consumption of large quantities of beer, was extensive.
In 1686, he stopped at Bedford, the plantation of William Fitzhugh,
and said his host provided “the largest hospitality—he
had a store of good wine and other things to drink.” He noticed
the local Indians drank no wine, but imbibed beer, cider, and a
punch made of beer, brandy, and nutmeg.

Religious and political unrest in France stimulated the emigration
of a new wave of colonists, this time Huguenots—Protestants
and Calvinists who fled to England in 1685. More than 800, among
them vignerons, sailed to Virginia with a Breton nobleman, Olivier
de la Muce, and settled above the falls of the James. In 1699, the
Huguenots founded Monacan Town and were soon producing wine and
brandy, including what they called “a Noble, strong-bodied
claret.”

Williamsburg was chartered and became Virginia’s capital the year
of Monacan—sometimes Manakin—Town’s founding. In a May
Day speech to Governor Francis Nicholson and the General Assembly, a student
from the six-year-old College of William and Mary said the city already
had many of the essentials of a metropolis, including “a Church,
an ordinary, several stores, two Mills, a smith’s shop, a Grammar
School, and above all, the Colledge.”

The ordinary may have been John Bentley’s. In 1697 he was licensed
to operate a tavern in Captain Matthew Page’s house. Five years
later, a Swiss traveler reported that there were eight taverns in the
capital. Among their keepers were entrepreneurs like Jean Marot.

Licensed in 1707, Marot’s ordinary, the English Coffee House,
became one of Williamsburg’s larger and more popular establishments.
Marot operated a couple of stills nearby, and his inventory in 1717 listed
such refreshments as Madeira, Canary, red port, Rhenish, brandy, and beer.
Later, Henry Wetherburn’s tavern stocked libations like arrack,
port, Madeira, claret, beers, and rum.

An idea of the variety of spirits available can be had from the records
of an expedition to the west undertaken in 1715 by sixty-three gentlemen
known to history as the Knights of the Golden Horseshoe. Among them was
John Fontaine, who said the group carried “Virginia red wine and
white, Irish usquebaugh, brandy, shrub, two sorts of rum, champagne, canary,
cherry, punch, water, cider, etc.”

Hugh Jones, a clergyman who taught mathematics and philosophy at
the college from 1717 to 1721, said Madeira was the most popular
wine, “for it relieved the heat of summer and warmed the chilled
blood and the bitter colds of winter.”

Robert King Carter, the wealthiest Virginian of his day, died in
1732, leaving many of his plantations to his son Charles. Educated
in England, the young man wrote a tract on “a whole new system
of Virginia Husbandry . . . wherein the business of Tobo farming,
improving lands and making Wine, are largely treated of and earnestly
recommended.”

Charles Carter became a burgess from King George County, worked
with the Royal Society of Arts, and corresponded with Peter Wyche
in London, chairman of the society’s agriculture committee.
They discussed the production of varieties of French, Spanish, and
Portuguese wines in Virginia, though Wyche thought the colony’s
location, terrain, and soil made it a less than ideal place to bottle
good wines. In 1762, Carter had 1,800 vines in his vineyard but,
because of drought, doubted he would produce more than a hogshead
of wine.

In 1768, Virginians exported to Britain a little more than thirteen
tons of wine while importing 396,580 gallons of rum from overseas,
and another 78,264 from other North American colonies.

Bottles and corking equipment in Thomas Jefferson's cellar, which
stored imported as well as domestic vintages

- Dave Doody

Two years later, the General Assembly designated Frenchman Andrew Estave
winemaker and viticulturist for Virginia. He was described as a long-time
resident of France who “hath a perfect Knowledge of the Culture
of Vines, and the most approved Method of making Wine.” Estave had
lived in the colony two years, studied the soil, and cultivated wild grapes.
Now he took 100 acres, a house, and three slaves, promising to make “good
merchantable Wine in four years from the seating and planting of the Vineyard.”
Like all before him, he failed. Estave thought his stocks of European
grapes—vitus vinifera—were too fragile for the climate.

Modern Virginia is a force in winemaking. The wine above was made by Gabriele Rausse Winery of Charlottesville with Monticello-grown Sangiovese grapes.

- Dave Doody

Virginia’s planters looked to London wine merchants for
regular supplies—the opposite of what was intended in 1606.
George Washington was ordering wines from Robert Cary & Co.
in London in 1759. About the time of his wedding to Martha Custis,
he asked Cary to “order from the best House in Madeira a Pipe
of the best Old Wines.” Two years later, thinking perhaps
that he might attempt to grow his own, he ordered “a Butt
of about one hundred and fifty gall’ns of your choicest Madeira.
And if there is nothing improper, or inconsistent in the request
a few setts or cuttings of the Madeira grape.”

Thomas Jefferson’s affinity for French culture and his curiosity
led him to plant vineyards at Monticello, and in 1773 he turned
over 2,000 acres of rolling land to a Tuscan, Filipo Mazzei, to
“prove the value of native grapes.” But Monticello winemaking
failed, perhaps because of the advent of the Revolution, or because
lice infested the roots and leaves.

Elected president in 1801, Jefferson spent $10,000, a fortune,
for wines during his administration, and to hold them ordered a
sixteen-foot-deep wine cellar constructed adjacent to the White
House. The pit was shaped like a flower pot and built of absorbent
clay bricks. A wooden superstructure protected the wine against
the weather, and bottles were racked on a platform floor above a
bed of ice, replenished monthly and packed in sawdust.

Under Jefferson’s influence, and with the cooperation of wealthy
planters, a Virginia winemaking industry began to flower in the early
nineteenth century, but the disruptions of the Civil War wiped out the
business along with the rest of the state’s economy.

Later in the century, the concept of prohibition gained wide support
in Virginia, stifling any revival of winemaking, and by World War I, the
state had gone dry. In 1919, the federal Eighteenth Amendment made national
the ban on the import, export, manufacture, sale, or transportation of
intoxicating liquors.

Virginia’s tidelands became fertile ground for contraband
liquor because of its natural resources and access to open water
and smugglers’ boats. Sheriffs sought out stills with land,
sea, and air patrols. Williamsburg’s Virginia Gazette reported
prohibition arrests for moonshining, sale of illegal alcohol, and
drunk driving.

After the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1933, Williamsburg
became the first city in the state to end Prohibition, and by 1934
state liquor stores opened. It was not until the mid-1970s that
Virginia began to compete again in the national wine market, using
French hybrids, vinifera varietals, and new fertilizing techniques
that helped counteract disease and mildew. The Farm Winery Law of
1980 boosted the industry, and technical aid from the United States
Department of Agriculture and state universities helped accelerate
the growth and quality of its product.

At Monticello, Jefferson’s northeast vineyard was replanted
in 1985 and his southwest vineyard in 1993. For the past year, visitors
to the historic home have had the opportunity to buy—so long
as the small supplies lasted—bottles of gift-shop wine.

Vintner Steve Warner samples a barrel at the Williamsburg Winery.

-
Dave Doody

There were six Virginia wineries in 1976, and more than seventy by 2002.
Virginia ranked tenth in the nation in volume, and its wines were winning
national and international acclaim—almost four centuries after the
sailing of the first Jamestown fleet.

Charles M. Holloway contributed to the summer 1997 journal
“Society of the Cincinnati.”